I Hope This Helps

by Samiya Bashir

Bending genre as a planetary body might bend spacetime, Bashir’s poems live as music and film, as memoir, observation, and critique, as movement across both cosmic and poetic fields.

I Hope This Helps reflects on the excruciating metamorphosis of an artist, “a twinkle-textured disco-ball Jenga set” constrained and shaped by the limits of our time, money, work, not to mention compounding global crises. Think of a river constrained by levees, a bonsai clipped and bent, a human body bursting through shapewear. Begging the question, what can it mean to thrive in the world as it is, Bashir says, “Rats thrive in sewers so / maybe I'm thriving.” In these moving, sometimes harrowing meditations, Bashir reveals her vulnerable inner life, how she has built herself brick by brick into an artist.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

Published May 13, 2025

About the author

Reach out to connect! Samiya Bashir is represented by:

Kelsey Day @ The Aragi Agency
Kelsey@Aragi.net
www.Aragi.net

/and/

Leslie Shipman @ The Shipman Agency
Leslie@TheShipmanAgency.com
www.TheShipmanAgency.com

Samiya Bashir is a poet, librettist, performer, multimedia artist, and author of four poetry collections, including I Hope This Helps, and Field Theories (2018 Oregon Book Award and Pushcart Prize winner). Her editorial work includes the forthcoming 30th Anniversary re-issue of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (Haymarket, 2026). Her artwork has been exhibited and performed internationally.

Bashir is a sought-after creative coach and teacher with recent appointments at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. Among her many honors are the Pushcart Prize and the Rome Prize for Literature. She lives in Harlem.

Reviews

[Leo]

I'm not a huge fan, sadly! The topics were hard-hitters, but the pages that caught my eye while flipping through (writing layered over a music score, for example) were fewer than I expected. It was mostly poems, which I'm not personally into as a majority of a book. If you like poem-filled books, though, you'd probably like this!

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful set of poems, moving me to tears at least 3 times. More striking and moving when read aloud. More tear jerking when sung. Even more powerful in the current time of the world. Read this to feel what you've denied yourself & to find hope.

[Shawn Ruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intense, deeply beautiful work!?

[Nikita Ladd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection, with its variety of mediums within the book (poetry, block print, sheet music overlaid on poems, photography) felt so alive. It was dynamic and exciting to read, and then the heart of the writing was real and tender as well. "Letter from Exile" reminded me that the pandemic was real, threw me back into the achey mental throws of 2020. It was so well written, poetic and transparent, too.